On the impact of disorder on dynamic network navigation

Dynamic networks like Online Social Networks or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), when considering their spatial, temporal and size complexity, even if partly wired, are exposed to nodes and links churns and failures which can be modeled with dynamic graphs with time varying edges and vertices. Recently, it has been shown that dynamic networks exhibit some regularity in their temporal contact patterns. The impact of this regularity on network performances has not been well studied and analyzed. One of the most interesting problem in research on dynamic networks is the issue of efficient navigation techniques in such networks. For dynamic networks, because there is still no widely developed theoretical background to understand deeply the problems, research traditionally tends to propose heuristic solutions. In the context of DTNs, these solutions tend to answer to some specific questions about navigating in a dynamic network (e.g., how to reduce energy consumption of routing, how to maximize the delivery probability) while usually ignoring and not leveraging on the profound structural properties of the dynamic network. In this work, we aim to contribute to understanding the impact of this dynamic structure on information routing and show how to exploit this structure for efficient navigation in such networks.